Tag: marketing

An Introduction to Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Paid Marketing

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Your brand has the power to reach millions of people around the world, and it only takes a few minutes to do. The power of pay-per-click (PPC) marketing is incredible, with a huge reach and the ability to target specific audiences.

How can you make the most of it?

Investing in PPC can bring a great return for your business (it’s thought paid advertising returns $2 for every $1 invested), but it’s also an easy way to lose money if you don’t approach it in the right way.

To help make sure you’re getting your PPC right, here’s my introduction to pay-per-click marketing.

What is Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Marketing?

Pay-per-click is a common advertising model in internet marketing. It allows advertisers to place ads on search engines, social media platforms, and third-party websites, paying a fee whenever the ad is clicked.

Example of a pay-per-click ad on Google

Generating over $134 billion in ad revenue, Google is the largest provider of PPC services. Its platform, Google Ads, is often the first stop for people beginning PPC marketing.

How Much is PPC Advertising?

Whenever you invest in advertising, you want to know how much it’s going to cost you. With PPC, this is a little complicated.

Online advertising isn’t like taking out an ad in a magazine, where you pay a fee and you get a full-cover page. Instead, with PPC, you pay when you get results (someone clicking your ad).

However, with offline advertising, you tend to pay a set fee regardless of the results you achieve. With PPC, you’ve got more control over how much each truly engaged consumer costs you.

This plays out through an auction system. Unlike a traditional auction, though, there isn’t one product with one winner—you’re bidding on how high up and how often your ad could be visible. “Losing” the auction doesn’t necessarily mean you get no PPC space—it means you get less.

Whenever a user searches for a certain keyword, say “PPC Marketing,” Google looks through its list of advertisers for this word and initiates an auction between them. A Google algorithm then chooses ads based on each advertiser’s maximum bid and the quality score of each ad.

The big takeaway from this is that it’s not just about how much you bid. The quality of your ad plays a huge part as well.

That said, if your max bid isn’t realistic, then your ads aren’t going to be shown often enough to be worthwhile. Different keywords have different average costs per click, and this should inform your bidding strategy.

Tools such as Ubersuggest and Google Ads Keyword Planner could give you a good feel for how much your ads are likely to cost, so they should play a role in your keyword research.

Is PPC Marketing Right for My Company?

Like any form of marketing, pay-per-click advertising has its pros and cons. Ideally, your company will use PPC as part of a complete digital marketing strategy, so you maximize its strengths and minimize its weaknesses.

Pros of PPC Marketing

  • Immediate results: As soon as your ads are approved, they will reach your target audience.
  • Highly targeted: You can be extremely specific about who sees your ads.
  • Easy to track: You can quickly track the success of your campaign and measure your ROI.
  • Potentially huge exposure: Paid ads are prominently displayed, with the potential to reach a virtually unlimited number of people.

Cons of PPC Marketing

  • Costly long-term option: You have to pay for every click, leaving you in the hands of advertising pricing. If you do this for months or years, it’ll add up.
  • Not building an asset: When you invest in content marketing or building an email list, you’re creating an asset you own. With PPC, your success is reliant on continued ad spend.

This is why my own digital marketing agency works to create a well-rounded digital marketing plan for your business. PPC has some amazing benefits, but you need good marketing in other areas as well.

PPC isn’t a replacement for organic SEO. The two should complement each other, with organic work taking a good amount of your focus because those clicks are free.

Six Steps to Starting a PPC Marketing Campaign

Starting your first PPC marketing campaign may feel surprisingly simple—you could do it in just six steps. Remember, ad quality plays a large part in your campaign’s success, so make sure you take your time and focus on each step.

1. Figure Out Your PPC Budget

How much do you want to spend on your pay-per-click marketing?

To begin with, you need to set an initial budget to allow you to test the waters. As a rough guide, you can look at some industry benchmarks to understand how much you’re likely to pay for each conversion.

Once you have an overall budget in mind, daily and lifetime spend caps for your campaigns.

This is an important part of creating a PPC campaign because your budget will greatly impact your ads’ success rates. Google Ads gives you good tools to help with this, and it’s worth following Google’s recommendations because its algorithms are designed to maximize your return.

You’ll be able to see an estimate of how many clicks your budget is likely to get you. From there, you can work out your potential return on investment based on your anticipated conversion rate.

If your budget doesn’t allow you to get meaningful results, it might be worth looking at some alternative marketing methods.

2. Set Your Campaign Goals

Different businesses will have different goals for their pay-per-click campaigns.

For example, if you’re doing a pre-launch for a start-up, your goal might be to drive traffic to the site and create awareness. If you’re selling a product, your main goal may be conversions.

The goals you set will have a big impact on your marketing campaign because each goal has a different value. A click isn’t as valuable as a lead or a conversion, and your cost-per-click should reflect this.

Setting up your campaign with the right goals allows you to better target the correct audience and accurately measure your return on investment. You’re paying for the click, not what the customer does afterward, when you use PPC—the click costs the same whether they purchase or not.

Consider who you want to click your ad and what actions you want them to take. When you understand this, optimize your entire campaign to encourage people to take those actions, which should bring down your costs.

3. Figure Out What Type of Campaign to Run

Another element to think about with PPC is what type of campaign you’re going to run. There are lots of options here, each giving you flexibility over how you reach your target audience:

  • Search ads: Ads showing at the top of search engines
  • Social ads: Ads on social media platforms
  • Remarketing ads: Ads that target people who have already visited your website
  • E-commerce ads: Ads on Google shopping that are focused on selling products
  • Instream ads: Commonly seen on YouTube, played before a video loads
  • Display ads: Dynamic ads showing on third-party websites, like in the image below

All these options give you the tools you need to target specific audiences. You need to find out where your audience hangs out and what they respond to. This will change depending on the buyer personas you’re trying to reach.

You don’t have to commit to one particular type of ad, and many businesses find a mix of different ad formats works best for them. However, it’s important to keep your eye on your ROI for each ad type so you can tweak your strategy accordingly.

4. Research Your Keywords

Keywords are one of the main tools you’ll use to target your audience, and your keyword research can make or break your campaign.

While you probably have a reasonable idea of how your customers search for your products or services, you need to narrow them down to those that result in people taking action.

A big part of this is understanding user intent. For example, who is more likely to make a purchase: someone searching “what is SEO?” or someone searching for “best keyword research tool?”

It’s probably the second one because of where that search fits into the buyer’s journey. Where people are in the buyer journey dictates how likely they are to make a purchase, so the keywords you choose need to reflect which stage you’re targeting.

Keywords that attract people who are further along in the buying process will generally cost you more, but they’re also more likely to lead to conversions.

5. Bid On Your Chosen Keywords

Most platforms give you different bidding options based on your goals. With Google Ads, this allows you to optimize for:

  • target CPA (cost per action)
  • target ROAS (return on ad spend)
  • maximize clicks
  • maximize conversions
  • maximize conversion value
  • target impression share
Pay-per-click marketing - Google Ads

Google will automatically bid on your behalf so it can optimize for your desired goal, but you still have some control over your bid. If you optimize to maximize clicks, for example, you can set a maximum bid. If you maximize for conversions, you can set a target cost per action.

It’s important to remember Google is there to help you get the most out of your ad spend. The algorithms are finely tuned to achieve this. It’s often wise to use Google’s recommendations, especially when starting out.

6. Create Keyword-focused Copy With Unique Landing Pages

Getting people to click your ads is only a small part of what you’re trying to achieve. It’s what happens when people land on your page that’s key.

No matter what your goals are, you need unique, engaging landing pages to achieve them.

Your landing pages need to offer a good user experience and be relevant to the ad the user clicked. People want quick access to the information they’re looking for, and if your landing page isn’t relevant to their keywords, they won’t hesitate to click back to Google.

In short, your PPC landing pages need to be optimized and A/B tested to make sure you’re getting the most out of them.

Conclusion

Pay-per-click advertising is an amazing way to reach a highly-targeted audience quickly. Through platforms such as Google, Bing, Facebook, Instagram, and many more, you can set up paid ads in seconds. Once approved, they could be seen by tens of thousands of people, depending on your budget.

While reaching your target audience is vitally important in marketing, the most important thing is what you do when you have people’s attention. This is why you need to give your paid campaigns the care and attention they need or find a company to do it for you.

When you find the right balance with PPC and have your ads perfectly optimized, it can bring you an excellent return on investment and become a vital part of your digital marketing weaponry.

Is pay-per-click advertising a great earner for your business?

25 Social Media Tools That Experts Use to Streamline Their Marketing

With more than 3.6 billion social media users worldwide, social media marketing cannot be ignored.

Savvy marketers know social media is a vital part of every marketing campaign. For businesses, every social media platform is an opportunity to engage with their target audience.

Even marketing stars know that strategizing and managing even a few social networks can be overwhelming without the right management social media tools in place.

Consider this:

How can you keep up with your Twitter account when you haven’t even checked Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok today? What about all those new social media sites that are popping up every other day (or so it seems)?

How do you know which ones to target for your brand and which to skip?

Take a deep breath.

Managing your social media shouldn’t be overwhelming. Social media tools can help:

  • Save you time by doing the posting, social listening, and hashtag research for you.
  • Save you money by allowing you to allocate resources to other tasks.
  • Maybe even save your brand’s reputation by catching a negative post in time for you to run interference and resolve the issue quickly.

I’ve done the research for you and organized the top social media marketing into five categories. We start with tools that help with the four stages of social media marketing: discovery, creation, monitoring and scheduling, and analyzing. Then, I added a fifth miscellaneous category at the end.

If you find yourself stuck in a particular stage, just head down to the relevant section.

Are you ready to get productive, optimize your social media marketing, and become an expert social media marketer?

Let’s begin.

Content Research and Discovery

According to Statista, users post 347,222 stories to Instagram, and 157,000 share messages on Facebook every minute. It can be overwhelming to find value-added content in all that noise.

Let’s look at content curation social media tools that help filter meaningful content so you can find images, posts, and conversations that will resonate with your audience.

1. Nuzzel

This tool organizes stories shared by friends and followers on Twitter, Facebook, and other social apps. It’s available as a web, Android, and iOS app.

It displays aggregated stories from your social media circle as easy-to-read links in a feed. You can also add influencers in your niche.

Nuzzel is a social media tool that curates a news feed from social platforms.

You can catch up on news from the last hour, or go through the past week using the “Sort By” option. You can tap into content shared by your second-degree connections, as well.

Finally, you can also curate content from your newsfeed into an email newsletter.

2. Feedly

Feedly aggregates the top content in your niche from industry blogs and other publications. Their AI bot, Leo, acts as a research assistant that learns your reading habits and delivers articles you’ll be interested in.

It then “reads” each article and annotates them with relevant summaries, analyses, and links to relevant content.

Social media tool Feedly reads and analyzes content.

Leo learns from your behavior. If you save an article, it will show you more like it. If you click “less like this,” Leo will remember and show you fewer articles on that topic.

You can also set up priorities within topics. Choose a sub-topic, and Leo will include those articles under a Priorities tab.

Social media tool Feedly includes a priorities tab within topics.

3. BuzzSumo

There are several reasons I love this tool. On top of content discovery, you can use it to research keywords, track online trends, and even find influencers within your vertical.

Use it to dissect your competition, understand your audience, and find content with the most social network shares.

The Chrome extension lets you do your research while you browse, as well. To use it, enter your keyword or phrase to discover the top-performing content.

You can use the filters to customize your search by language, time frame, country, and a number of other parameters.

You can find the popularity of content on a particular social network by using the “sort by” feature.

You can also plug a blog URL into the tool to find its top-performing content pieces.

Analyze content articles with social media tool BuzzSumo.

4. Tagboard

This is another great social media tool for monitoring and searching for hashtags relevant to your industry and track brand mentions.

To start your search, plug in the keyword, and the tool delivers content from several platforms.

Here are search results for #neilpatel:

Find relevant hashtags with social media tool TagBoard.

You can directly respond to these mentions, right from the screenshot page.

On the right sidebar, you get useful stats around the frequency and sentiment of your hashtag.

Analyze hashtags with social media tool TagBoard.

Tagboard is especially useful to track conversations and engagement during conferences and live events.

Visual Content Creation

According to Venngage, 49 percent of surveyed marketers rated visual content as very important, but 43 percent said producing it consistently was their biggest challenge.

Social media has become undeniably visual, and having a presence on Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok, YouTube, and other visual platforms is paramount.

Here are a couple of social media tools to help you create videos, images, diagrams, Pinterest boards, infographics, and more.

5. Canva

This is a simple graphic design web tool with pre-made templates for all kinds of social networks and uses.

It combines some of the best elements of Photoshop with a drag-and-drop functionality.

Drag-and-drop functionality in social media tool Canva

For every template, there are a variety of layouts, fonts, and backgrounds to choose from. And if you find yourself having trouble with a particular functionality, there are free tutorials to help you design better graphics.

For example, if you’re considering repurposing your most shared content for an infographic, there’s a tutorial for creating simple infographics with Canva.

Here are ten websites to source free and premium stock photos you can use in your designs.

6. Biteable

Biteable allows you to create videos, animations, motion graphics, and a number of other visuals for social, ads, and even presentations. You can use any of their templates to get started.

You can sync your marketing calendar with theirs to get tips and ready-to-go video templates for relevant seasons, holidays, and events.

Content calendar functionality in social media tool Biteable

7. Pixlr

Pixlr is a freemium service with a lot of the functionality of Photoshop.

Its free services include Pixlr X (for express) with essential tools for quick editing. Pixlr E (for editor) offers a more extensive selection of tools for more sophisticated content creation and Remove BG, an AI-based background removal tool.

If you need even more photo editing capabilities, they offer a subscription-based plan that includes more stickers, overlays, and visual effects, as well.

Pixlr offers templates, as well, some free and some part of the subscription service.

Templates available in social media tool Pixlr

Pro Tip: One-Pixel Pinterest Image

The images you share on Pinterest should be vertically aligned. But, if you insert a tall image directly into a blog post, it’ll take up a lot of real estate.

The solution is uploading the tall Pinterest image below the first picture of your post. Then, change its height and width to one pixel each.

Now, the image will appear when you click on the “Pin it” button to share on Pinterest. The alt text of the Pinterest image automatically serves as the caption for the image.

Monitoring and Scheduling

It’s impossible to manage your brand’s social media accounts 24 hours a day, seven days a week. But the world of social media doesn’t turn off at 5 p.m.

Social media tools for monitoring and scheduling can help. They can save you hours every week by combining your brand activity from multiple social media networks into one dashboard.

8. Hootsuite

Hoot is a full-service social media management tool that lets you track mentions, engagement, and other metrics across all of your social platforms. You can schedule and track posts using their analytics tools and respond to mentions via your dashboard.

9. Buffer

This is an amazing app to schedule updates from your social network accounts at the times that you work best for your brand.

It works a lot like Hootsuite. You can create and schedule social posts, and then track them through their analytics.

Analytics example from social media tool Buffer

Buffer will also prioritize social mentions for you, so you can respond to the most pressing ones first.

10. Hopper HQ

Hopper HQ connects your brand with top content creators in your vertical. Once you choose from a list of recommended creators, they deliver content you can share in posts and paid ads.

11. CoSchedule

CoSchedule is a simple, integrated social media and blog publishing calendar.

Publishing calendar example from social media tool CoSchedule

It also includes a suite of organizing tools for social media, brand assets, work, and content. Schedule your blog posts, collaborate with different authors on a post, and assign specific tasks to different people.

It has an easy-to-use, drag-and-drop interface, as well.

In the calendar view itself, you can also keep track of the most shared and engaged with content.

12. IFTTT

If This Then That is a fantastic social media tool to connect applications and automate social actions. IFTTT offers a series of applets that allow you to connect platforms and streamline your work.

For example, you can send your Instagrams to Twitter as native tweets. You can also get a weekly notification email of all of the people who followed you on Twitter. You can also archive tweets to a Google spreadsheet.

You can create your own applet from scratch by choosing a trigger and appending an action to it.

Or, you can use applets created by other people.

Applets available in social media tool IFTTT

In this article, Kristi Hines explains a killer recipe to directly schedule social media updates from your Feedly account.

You can schedule the articles you choose to read later in Feedly on your social network accounts through Buffer. You only need Gmail and Buffer accounts to set up this applet.

Social Media Analytics

The best way to find the most effective social network for your business is by tracking your social media marketing efforts.

The right data allows you to calculate ROI from your social media marketing campaigns. It’ll help you find your top-performing content, so you can tweak your campaign and optimize your marketing efforts.

Let’s look at a few social media tools to measure and analyze your social activities.

13. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is one of the most widely used analytics tools to track user behavior on websites. But, you can also track social reports under its reporting tab.

To access your social network standing, log into your Analytics account. Then, head over to the Reporting tab. Click on Acquisition > Social.

Set up goals inside Analytics to access these social reports. There are standard templates inside analytics you can use to set actionable goals for your social media marketing campaigns.

If you get stuck, use Google’s official step-by-step guide for setting goals.

There are eight reports you can see under social analytics–Overview, Network Referral, Data Hub Activity, Landing Pages, Trackbacks, Conversions, Plugins, and Visitors Flow.

Once you set up goals, you’ll be able to see your social media impact in Overview.

Social value graphic in social media tool Google Analytics

The most important report is conversions.

You can break down your social media campaign by network and find out the most successful platform.

If you’re interested in the user behavior–the like and share buttons your visitors are clicking–you’ll need to set up social plugins.

Although setting up this report might take time, the end results are worth the effort:

A clear picture of the social network that provides the best ROI and the kind of content you should create for it.

14. HubSpot

HubSpot has a number of tools, from marketing automation to a full content management system. Their Marketing Hub allows you to create and manage social media posts, video for social, and conversations from their platform.

15. Followerwonk

To get the best results from a real-time social network like Twitter, you need to be active when your followers are online.

Followerwonk analyzes your Twitter followers and tells you when your followers are most active.

You can also use it to find influencers in your niche and discover relevant people to follow.

You can also track your followers by demographics, such as age.

Demographics pie chart from social media tool FollowerWonk

16. Olapic

Olapic is a great tool to add to your visual marketing arsenal. You can use the tool to discover, curate, and schedule user-generated content across Instagram, Pinterest, and all your other social accounts.

Use it on your site, in your social ads, and in your emails to lift engagement and increase conversions.

17. Keyhole

For Instagram and Twitter, a good hashtag analyzer can go a long way. Keep up-to-speed on hashtags relevant to your industry with Keyhole.

The tool also uses machine learning to forecast whether your campaigns will hit their goals.

Finally, Keyhole tracks and monitors influencer performance. You can use it to compare influencers to determine who is most effective for your brand.

18. Semrush

Not only does Semrush allow you to create, schedule, and track your own posts, it also lets you track and analyze your competitors’ posts, too. You can also use it to optimize your social ads.

SEMRush is also helpful for general keyword and content research in your vertical (or you can also use Ubersuggest for this).

Miscellaneous Tools To Increase Social Engagement on Your Website

You are already equipped with the best social media tools to research, curate, plan, schedule, monitor, and analyze your social media marketing efforts.

What about social engagement on your website? The end goal of most social campaigns is to increase your website’s engagement and traffic.

Here are some tools to power your website and drive social media interaction.

19. ClickToTweet

A simple way to increase the number of tweets on your blog post is by adding a link to every actionable comment. When a reader clicks on the link, it automatically adds a tweet to their Twitter account.

You can track all of your embedded links from the dashboard.

You can also analyze their performance using their analytics tool.

If you’re on WordPress, there is a simpler alternative–Better Click to Tweet plugin.

20. Share Buttons by AddToAny

Floating share buttons can either help or hurt your engagement and conversions, according to BigCommerce. For example, sharing buttons with counters can hurt conversions if the number of shares is low, while adding share buttons to product pages can actually distract users.

The best way to find out when and where to use share buttons is through extensive testing.

If you’re on WordPress, you can start with Share Buttons by AddToAny plugin. It has the option to activate share buttons in the sidebar, as well as above and below every content piece.

You can also customize the number of social networks you want to show your visitors, from the ones below.

I recommend experimenting with two or three social media share buttons and stick to the social networks where your audience hangs out.

21. Snip.ly

Do you feel like you’re losing time curating and endorsing content by other publishers?

Snip.ly can give it back to you. It’s a link shortener with a great add-on: a customized call to action for every link you share with the tool.

You can use it to drive direct traffic to your website by adding a non-intrusive, custom CTA at the bottom of each post you share.

The CTA can include customized messages, colors, images, and themes.

CTA example from social media tool Snip.ly

Besides direct traffic, you can drive app downloads, email list signups, and event registrations.

The analytics dashboard allows you to track the number of clicks and conversions.

22. Onalytica

Influencers are a trusted source of information for your customers. A recommendation from them can lift your product sales and brand visibility.

But, how can you find influencers interested in your post, service, or product?

That’s where Onalytica comes in. It finds relevant influencers for your brand based on your article link or uploaded file.

It scans an article, then generates a list of targeted influencers in under a minute. After reverse-engineering relevant influencers, you can connect and start building a relationship.

23. CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer

Headlines play a key role in engagement. It’s no wonder that Upworthy used to write 25 headlines for every post.

CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer is a great tool to ensure headlines attract attention—and clicks.

Using it is simple:

  1. Head over to www.coschedule.com/headline-analyzer.
  2. Plug your headline in the “Type your headline here” bar.
  3. Press the “Analyze Now” button.

You’ll get an overall score for your headline and a grade for the variety of words you’ve used, top keywords in your headline, and the sentiment your headline evokes

24. KingSumo

KingSumo helps brands manage giveaways on social media that can help drive emails sign ups and followers.

To create a giveaway, create a title, description, start and end date, and the number of winners. Then, post it directly to your social accounts.

You can manage and track all of your giveaways from a single dashboard.

Dashboard for social media tool KingSumo.

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25. Facebook Comments Plugin

If a large section of your audience hangs out on Facebook, then activating Facebook Comments on your website can increase engagement and bring you closer to your social media marketing goals.

But, beware. There is a risk of comment scams that easily pass spam filters. You’ll need to stay on top of comment moderation.

Conclusion

Social media can become a huge distraction, even if it does help drive your business. Manually logging in to post blogs and business updates can eat up valuable time you could use to build a new product, take care of vendor orders, or handle customer concerns.

Start incorporating the above tools in your armory to automate repetitive tasks and batch your social media posts.

They’ll save you time every week. They’ll also improve your ROI from social media marketing and your bottom line.

Have I missed any of your favorite social media marketing tools? Can you share your social media productivity secrets? Please let me know in the comments below.

The post 25 Social Media Tools That Experts Use to Streamline Their Marketing appeared first on Neil Patel.

SMS Marketing Doesn’t Suck: Here’s How to Use it To Generate Revenue

Did you know the average person checks their phone 160 times a day?

Which is just one of the reasons SMS marketing no longer sucks.

Forty-six percent of people say they check their phones before they even get out of bed.

The point is that people keep their phones handy and are always ready to use them to find information or check the latest social media updates.

Plus, open rates for texts vastly surpass email — 98 percent versus just 20 percent for email.

Mobile advertising works, but only if your message makes it to the consumer’s inbox, and only if your ad is mobile-optimized.

It’s the only way to steer clear of the noise and get a positive return on investment.

Most online marketers laugh at the idea of SMS marketing because they think it’s more regulated than email marketing. But that’s a myth.

Watered-down, mobile-targeting tactics are costing you conversions, clients, and revenue.

Meanwhile, SMS marketing is lurking in the background, waiting for you to capitalize on it.

Here’s why (and how) you should revisit SMS marketing to generate revenue.

The Many Advantages of SMS Marketing

Do you think Instagram has good engagement numbers?

Wait until you see what text messages get.

SMS Marketing Advantage #1. Texting Has The Best Engagement Rate of Any Marketing Medium

Emails can sit unread for days, phone calls can go unanswered, but text messages are almost always read immediately after they’re sent.

We already talked about the comparatively dismal open rates for email. The average CTR for PPC ads is even worse at 2%.

The point is that SMS marketing is underrated and underappreciated.

But nothing great comes without its catch.

It’s neither ethical nor legal to send unsolicited messages with text-message marketing.

You need a written opt-in.

sms marketing example of unsolicited message

Fortunately, customers have an easy way to opt themselves in — or out — straight from their mobile phones with most text-marketing services.

Using Attentive’s patent-pending “two-tap” technology, customers can opt-in to a brand’s text messaging subscriber list seamlessly from their mobile website, social media, or other digital channels.

With one tap, a message will populate in their message inbox. They simply press send on the pre-populated text message to opt-in and receive a welcome message.

attentive mobile sms marketing optin

Here are some of the advantages of mobile text messaging.

SMS Marketing Advantage #2. It’s Trackable

There are countless texting platforms that allow you to manage your campaign all from your desktop.

Find a solution that will give you access to detailed analytics that lets you track each step in the conversion process, starting with the initial delivery and opening.

SMS Marketing Advantage #3. You Can Leverage Interactive Content

Mobile messaging makes it possible to get feedback from your recipients quickly via a quick tap on the ‘reply’ button or a click on your link.

You can deliver quick, simple messages that direct subscribers back to your site.

For example, Chipotle excels at using mobile messaging to drive sales.

sms marketing example from Chipotle

It’s short and sweet. It gets straight to the point with “free chips and guac” if you play their game.

Not a bad deal, right?

Especially since they have queso now, too.

Get creative with your text-marketing campaigns and take a page out of the Chipotle playbook.

SMS Marketing Advantage #4. Immediate Delivery

Overall, mobile marketing is fast. Once you press “send,” your message goes out instantly.

You can set up a campaign and have hundreds of clicks within minutes.

sms marketing example from subway

SMS Marketing Advantage #5. Add a Personal Touch

Sending a text message via your mobile device gives you an informal opportunity to personalize the message.

For example,  the Banana Republic often sends text messages that include words like “friends” and “your.”

Using words like “you” and “I” is one of my favorite techniques for driving engagement.

The Banana Republic also does an excellent job of tapping into local events that are relevant to the recipient.

SMS marketing example banana republic

See? The opportunities with SMS are endless.

You can personalize your message, direct users to fun games where they can win coupons, and track every step of the conversion process.

Here’s how it works.

The Basic Components of SMS Marketing

The two basic components of a typical SMS-marketing campaign are the keyword and the shortcode. Here’s an example:

Text “POPCORN” to 555555 for our weekly list of flavors!

“POPCORN” is the keyword that gets placed in the body of the message.

“555555” is the shortcode that gets put in the recipient box.

When a customer sends that message, they’re “opting in” to your campaign. It’s as easy as that.

From there you can do a few different things.

Go ahead and send them a single, automated response to follow up and let them know what to expect next. Or you can just add them to a list that will send additional texts over time.

There are other ways to get customers to opt-in. Let them check a box on an order form or submit their phone numbers online.

Numbers received this last way have to be confirmed, however, since a customer could always enter a number incorrectly.

dominos sms marketing opt in

So before you add them to a campaign, you’ll have to confirm their participation with another message.

For example, you could send. “Text ‘YES’ to receive weekly coupons.”

Once they’ve opted in, customers can also respond to your messages with sub-keywords.

For example, sending the phrase “Hours” could trigger an automated text to send business hours, and “Stop” could remove the subscriber from the list.

Allowing customers to use sub-keywords gives them a way to interact with your business. It also enables them to opt-out of your campaign if they wish to stop receiving messages.

Once you’ve got the basics down, you can tap into creative ideas — like Chipotle’s game, which we covered earlier.

SMS Marketing Strategies to Try

Mobile texting tactics are diverse.

However, they should be pretty familiar if you’ve already run social promotions and contests.

For example, you can send coupons, drive traffic, or engage people through fun, simple games.

Here are some of the best potential uses for SMS marketing.

SMS Marketing Tip #1. Coupons and Exclusive Deals

Start by creating uniquely-generated coupon codes to prevent non-subscribers from taking advantage of your deal.

That way, people have to subscribe to save.

Check out this example from Redbox:

sms marketing example redbox

Redbox also takes advantage of “add to wallet.”

It’s giving you a simple one-click option to hook up your phone’s payment system with its offer.

Plus, the subscriber gets an extra incentive for taking this additional step. Customers don’t have to take an extra step to pay when they want to rent movies.

SMS Marketing Tip #2. Use Drip Campaigns 

Drip campaigns are automated messages sent based on specific factors, such as how long someone has been a customer.

Think of this as just another form of marketing automation.

You can create triggers or tailored responses depending on each individual’s status.

In the context of coupons, for example, you could send a 5 percent off coupon right after the subscriber signs up, a 10 percent coupon after three weeks, and a 20 percent off coupon after two months.

The longer they stick around, the bigger the potential bonus. So you’re incentivizing the action you want.

Best of all, you can schedule these to run automatically.

One will be sent as soon as a customer signs up or opts in. That way, you don’t need to keep sending individual messages.

SMS marketing send drip campaigns

SMS Marketing Tip #3. Poll Your Customers

Polls let your customers text different keywords to cast a vote.

With most services, you can run polls to collect responses over a period of time and graph the responses from your online dashboard.

sms marketing poll

These are relatively simple when you think about it.

However, they offer an interesting content piece.

You can use the results internally to improve your operations.

Or you can reuse the results in both blog and social content to leverage your unique, proprietary information.

The people who left an answer will also be more eager to find out what the eventual results were and even help you share them.

SMS Marketing Tip #4. Run a Sweepstakes Contest

You can have customers sign themselves up for sweepstakes by texting a particular keyword.

Once again, this is a standard promotion tactic.

You can select some winners from everyone who opts in. Or you can also give away a smaller prize to every person who texts your keyword.

You can even use it as an opportunity for cross-promotions.

Sterling Vineyards and Uber did that to give away free rides to Sterling’s customer base.

sms marketing tip create a contest

SMS Marketing Tip #5. Send Photos and Videos

 In addition to actual text SMS messaging, you can also send photos and videos.

Here’s what I mean.

Let’s say you wanted to send an eBook preview or another image-style CTA.

Check out this example I created to see what’s possible with just a few minutes worth of work.

Sms marketing tip send photos and videos

Want to create this type of marketing message? I’ll show you how a bit later in this piece.

Use Facebook to Grow Your SMS List

Instead of putting all of your eggs in one basket, use multiple channels to segment subscribers.

SMS and Facebook Ads are excellent on their own. But they can be even better when you use them together.

I recommend checking out Facebook’s lead ads to integrate with your SMS campaigns.

Lead ads are great for collecting data and information to build up a large subscriber base.

Here’s how to get started.

Head to the Facebook Ads Manager and create a new ad, selecting lead generation as your objective.

sms marketing choose a goal in facebook ads

After you’ve set your target audience, budget, and placements, head down to the lead form option to set up your ad and collect phone numbers.

SMS marketing create facebook ads

Here’s what the finished product should look like.

SMS marketing facebook ad example

Now you get a multi-step form that doesn’t bombard the user with an instant information grab.

Instead, it uses multiple steps to warm them up to your offer.

Pretty cool, right?

Here’s what the second step of the form looks like.

SMS marketing facebook ad example

Once you’ve configured your settings, you’ve got a simple way to collect phone numbers immediately.

That means you’re almost ready to start getting your first SMS campaign off the ground.

How to Automate SMS Marketing

Since we’re into the idea of working smarter and not harder, I suggest automating the SMSM marketing process.

Let’s face it: Marketing automation saves precious time you can spend growing your business.

For example, you don’t have to manually export and import lead data. Instead, you can use a tool like Zapier to quickly build out an automated process.

Zapier connects with just about every marketing software you can think of, including MailChimp, Gmail, Facebook Ads, Slack, and many of the biggest CRMs on the market.

sms marketing automation use zapier

So if you get a few people submitting phone numbers in your Facebook lead ads, you can send them directly to your CRM, your messaging platform, and even various SMS marketing platforms. All at the same time!

Here’s a few of the texting apps they work with, or you can search here.

sms marketing use zapier

Let’s dive straight in, shall we?

First, select Facebook Lead Ads from the workflow ideas list.

connect facebook lead ads SMS marekting

Next, select it as your trigger.

sms marketing connect fb lead ads and zapier step 2

So whenever a lead fills out your lead capture form, it will trigger the following action that you want to set.

I’ll show you how to set that up in one second. But it could be anything from sending that lead form information to your CRM to connecting it to your SMS marketing software.

Now, let’s select this action once you’ve connected your Facebook account to Zapier’s workflow.

The action determines what happens with the data from your lead forms.

SMS marketing zapier and FB lead ads step 3

For example, you can instantly add a new lead to your SMS app of choice. Then you can even automate the first message that will go out to them after they’re added.

All of this automation saves you countless hours of manually transferring data and information.

Conclusion

Let’s be honest: SMS marketing can be kinda spammy.

It has evolved a lot over the past few years, though.

People are attached to their phones more than ever, and SMS marketing allows you to get direct access to your customers.

If you can get them to opt-in, they’re never going to miss an update or offer from your company ever again.

Especially if your SMS are personalized for the recipient!

Find an SMS app and start sending coupons, polling your customers, running sweepstakes, sending photos, and driving sales. The options are limitless.

Get creative with your text offers and watch your ROI grow fast.

Have you received any SMS marketing messages that you just had to respond to?

The post SMS Marketing Doesn’t Suck: Here’s How to Use it To Generate Revenue appeared first on Neil Patel.

How is MLOps Used in Business and Marketing?

Chances are, your brand has data scientists and operations professionals on the team, and while they do their best to collaborate, they each have their own areas of expertise.

This could lead to miscommunications and misunderstandings. The data scientists can interpret the data, but they likely don’t have the background to manage business operations. Likewise, the business team can make their side of things work, but they don’t fully know how to interpret and implement data.

Here is where machine learning operations (MLOps) come in.

In this article, we’ll discuss how MLOps can help with collaboration between your data and business teams, as well as additional immediate and future benefits of implementing it.

What is MLOps?

MLOps, in simple terms, is a set of best practices for improving communication and collaboration between your employees on the data science and operations sides of your brand.

In less simple terms, it’s a combination of machine learning, data engineering, and development operations. The goal is to provide a more streamlined process for developing and creating machine learning systems, allowing business administrators, data scientists, marketers, and IT engineers to cooperate on the same level.

It is an extension of what we know as DevOps. DevOps is the process of organizing cooperation between everyone involved in the design and building of big data. This process has been around for a while, but MLOps is still in its youth.

MLOps creates a lifecycle and a set of practices that apply to the development of machine learning systems. This includes research, development, operations, and implementation.

What Is MLOps

The process of brainstorming, developing, and implementing machine learning is extensive. Having a set of duplicatable processes to guide each project helps in many ways.

5 Benefits of MLOps

Now that we have a general understanding of MLOps, let’s look at how it can impact our businesses. All new technology has either a positive or negative effect on the digital marketing industry, so it’s crucial we understand what we’re getting.

1. MLOps Can Increase Efficiency and Automation

Making the most of our time is something most of us strive to do.

Ironically, we spend a lot of time figuring out how to do this.

We may look into all different kinds of apps and books. We could spend days reading articles or even attending seminars on efficiency and time management.

But, perhaps automating would be simpler for many people.

Automation, by definition, should increase efficiency. Once minute tasks are out of people’s hands, they can focus on big picture issues.

An essential but draining task many folks on data science teams spend time doing is data entry. That’s time they could spend focusing on the science rather than passively improving their typing skills (and, we all know, a typo in data entry can bring disaster!).

MLOps gives options for automating tasks like data entry. It takes some work upfront, but once things are going, the data scientists can get back to what they do best.

2. MLOps Eliminates Waste

MLOps helps businesses improve communication and avoid bottlenecks and costly errors.

How much time have you wasted answering the same questions, reiterating a previous point, or working extra hours to clean up an error because someone simply didn’t know what to do—or what someone else was supposed to be doing?

If you had a set of operations for each employee or contractor to follow, there would be no need to answer the same question continually. You could send them an operations checklist, and they work through it until completion.

The best thing about this is it’s highly duplicatable. I’ll use the example of a content marketing company creating content for its clients.

Let’s say you run a site reviewing camping products. Every page should follow the same basic format so your readers can easily compare products or skim to the parts they care about most.

Suppose you give your reviewers and editors a template to follow, step-by-step instructions, and information about what the others are doing. In that case, confusion can be lessened, and you can focus on which hiking boots are best in winter weather.

MLOps does this, not for content, but for communication. It allows leaders to share “templates” of what should be done on a given day and, after any frontloading, questions should lessen and related waste eliminated.

3. MLOps Focuses on Collaboration

As mentioned, a lack of communication can kill a business quickly. Collaboration between departments is so crucial. Otherwise, work gets lost, notes aren’t passed on, things get missed—and tempers may flare.

MLOps creates procedures for passing one task on to another department. The word “lifecycle” is often used to describe this process.

As a project moves through the lifecycle, workers should be able to see what has happened, what should be happening now, and what will happen next.

This is where we put on our marketer hat and look towards tools like ClickUp and Trello. These are useful for managing large numbers of tasks at the same time.

People involved in the project can access things like checklists and previous conversations at all points in the pipeline, eliminating the wait for responses on work chats or dealing with the dreaded group email.

Communications come in order, everyone who needs to be in on the conversation can be, and they’re unlikely to get lost in dozens of messages.

This process also allows for documentation. Not only does this create a paper trail of who did what so the right people can be given feedback, but it also eliminates miscommunication because it’s all outlined already.

4. MLOps Supports Machine Learning Models

MLOps Supports Machine Learning Models

Reducing the amount of variation from one project to another is an important key to scaling any business. MLOps help do this by creating reproducible models you can use as a benchmark at the beginning of each new project.

These data set registries help track resources, project data, logs, and metrics. These factors combined eliminate bottlenecks, reduce wasted time, and help move projects through the pipeline faster.

Essentially what you’re doing is creating a template that can be used over and over. These machine learning “templates” or “models” help reduce production time and produce a better product by having a benchmark to follow each time a new machine learning model comes out.

Having a duplicatable model is vital in marketing because it allows you to input any variable and experience the same result. SEO is an exceptional example of this.

Once you have a proven strategy to create content, upload it, optimize it, drive links to it, and re-optimize, you’ll never have to worry about variables because the steps are the same.

It wouldn’t matter if you were ranking an article about ergonomic keyboards or funeral home carpeting because the bones are the same.

It starts with providing those in need with the resources they want on their own time. We live in a 24-7 connected world where people work all different kinds of hours.

Gone are the days of working 9-5 and leaving all your work behind. Every employee or contractor you have should be able to receive an answer to any question when they need it.

If they have to sit around and wait for you to come back into the office in the morning, it’s creating a bottleneck, slowing down your process, and ultimately costing you money.

5. MLOps Makes Deployment and Implementation Easier

MLOps’ ability to improve communication, create processes, and automate things can make deployment and implementation easier because of the inherently reduced chances of errors.

With MLOps at their fingertips, developers can pack models much faster while still maintaining quality control with profiling and model validation.

It provides a way for data scientists and administrators to perform at a higher level with confidence in knowing each step was followed and validated for consistency.

What is the Future of MLOps in Business and Marketing?

MLOps is a new but colossal industry expected to hit $4 billion by 2025. The most significant impact it may have relates to how we manage data.

Data is meaningless if you don’t have an understandable way to translate it.

Machine learning operations allow you to take that data and turn it into something tangible. For example, if you made some changes to a specific business model and you notice worsening results after six months, you may want to circle back to the original model.

Plus, MLOps provides consistency. Producing a consistent product is a tall order because each scenario is different, and you’ll likely run into unique issues each time. Businesses all over the world struggle to put out a consistent product/service time and time again.

MLOps helps data scientists and operations managers work together to produce consistent results across a considerable time frame. As the project moves from one end of the pipeline to another, all the people involved need to have a way to ensure quality is maintained. MLOps can even automate the process of quality assurance with routine scans.

Conclusion

MLOps helps create lines of communication between everyone involved in the process of developing machine learning technology. As marketers, we can learn something from this and implement the same principles in our businesses.

Every business can benefit from clear guidelines and processes to follow. If you’re experiencing bottlenecks, slow production times, and a large number of errors, you might want to pull back the curtain and take a look at your procedures as a whole.

If that sounds like a lot of work, we can help!

How do you think MLOps will impact business and marketing?

The post How is MLOps Used in Business and Marketing? appeared first on Neil Patel.

How to Use Machine Learning to Improve Your Digital Marketing

Machine learning is on the verge of transforming the marketing sector. In many ways, it’s already started. According to Gartner, 30% of companies will use machine learning in one part of their sales process by 2020.

What’s more, these companies are using machine learning to get ahead of competitors by tackling some of marketing’s toughest challenges, such as personalization, instant customer support, and big data.

In other words, machine learning isn’t just for computer scientists. Marketers should sit up and take notice. Below, I’ve covered five ways you can use machine learning to supercharge your digital marketing efforts.

What Is Machine Learning?

Before we get into the marketing side of things, let’s take a second to establish what artificial intelligence and machine learning are.

Artificial intelligence is simply any form of intelligence demonstrated by a machine instead of the natural intelligence displayed in humans and animals. When most people think of artificial intelligence, they think specifically of computers that replicate some level of human intelligence, like a chess-playing computer I mentioned in the introduction.

Machine learning is a branch of artificial intelligence that enables systems to find new and better solutions automatically by learning from mistakes and experiences. The more data and experience a machine learning algorithm has access to, the better it becomes in the future.

Machine learning systems can largely be divided into two subsets: guided and unguided. Guided machine learning systems are supplied with data sets and solutions by humans in the first instance. They are taught which patterns to look for initially and will then get better at identifying those patterns going forward.

Unguided systems are given access to unsorted and disparate data sets and are left to decipher patterns independently without guidance from humans. Unguided systems will create an algorithm and then look for ways to improve it going forward.

Using Machine Learning to Improve Your Marketing

We know that marketing teams don’t want for lack of data. Marketers struggle with making sense of all the data they have at their fingertips and then putting that data to use. This analysis is where machine learning comes in.

The primary reason to add machine learning to your marketing stack is that it can make sense of vast amounts of data much faster and much more effectively than humans.

Machine learning can use data to identify patterns and make predictions almost instantly. Marketers can then use these insights to optimize a huge portion of their workflow, from running more tests and improving their website’s UX to personalizing the customer experience and automating consumer engagement.

The long and short of it is machine learning can be used to improve just about every part of your digital marketing efforts. Below we discuss five of the most important ways.

Analyze Data Sets

However you use machine learning in your marketing efforts, the process will probably begin by analyzing data sets.

For instance, machine learning can be used to analyze and find user activity patterns on your website. Rather than sifting through data in your Google Analytics profile yourself, a machine learning algorithm could do the job in seconds, predicting future user behavior and identifying patterns that you can use to optimize your site.  

Sure, humans are perfectly capable of analyzing data themselves, but you can’t do it half as fast or accurately as AI-powered solutions.

Marketers can also use machine learning to gain a better understanding of their customer base.

Take customer segmentation, for instance. Dividing up your audience into different groups can make your marketing efforts much more effective, but it’s time-consuming to do so yourself. On the other hand, a machine learning algorithm could automatically segment your customer base based on actions and behavioral patterns that you couldn’t hope to identify.

Create and Optimize Content

You don’t need me to reiterate the importance of content in your digital marketing efforts. However, you may need clarification on how machine learning can improve what you write and publish and why using machine learning in your content marketing strategy is essential.

For starters, machine learning can help your articles rank higher in search engine results. It’s one thing to be a great writer; it’s another to write in a way that pleases Google, so it rewards you in the SERPs. You need to make sure you use all relevant keywords, discuss every relevant topic, and cover all of your bases in general.

That’s pretty hard to do without smart content creation tools like Frase.io, which uses machine learning to compare your content against Google’s top results and make sure you hit all of the relevant points.

Machine learning Frase

Second, you can have machine learning algorithms write content for you. Phrasee is an AI-powered copywriting tool that uses machine learning to create email subject lines and push notifications that its algorithm believes will drive the highest ROI.

Machine learning AI Copywriting

You can even use AI to help you curate content for your customers. Curata offers a machine learning content curation software that helps marketers find and publish the most relevant and engaging content for their audiences.

Machine Learning Curata

Increase Personalization

Personalization matters for consumers. Research by Accenture shows 91% of consumers prefer brands that remember who they are and provide relevant offers and recommendations as a result. What’s more, if they don’t get a personalized experience, over half of consumers are only too happy to switch to a competitor.

Here’s the good news: machine learning lets you deliver the most personalized customer experience possible. You can employ a machine learning algorithm that tracks user behavior on a granular level, learns what products they like, and creates a personalized homepage and recommendation list as a result.

Amazon, for instance, uses AI algorithms that take into account the purchase history of users, the items in their cart, and their viewing habits to offer the product recommendations that are most likely to convert.

The same algorithm could also generate personalized offers for every customer and email them to consumers when they are most likely to purchase.

Improve Marketing Automation

Better personalization is one way machine learning can transform how your brand engages customers, but it’s not the only way. AI and machine learning can also be used to better automate your marketing efforts and significantly improve customer engagement as a result.

Let’s say you automatically send an email to customers when they sign up for your newsletter or abandon their cart. While most brands will send a generic email, companies that adopt machine learning can tailor content and offers based on that consumer’s browsing history. If they looked at your brand’s range of dog toys before signing up for your newsletter, a relevant offer on chew toys would make them much more likely to re-engage with your brand.  

For SaaS brands, AI-powered marketing automation tools can analyze much larger and disparate data sets to better segment leads. This allows sales reps to prioritize those leads that are much more likely to convert.

Marketing automation is incredibly powerful. According to Invesp, marketing automation leads to an over 14% increase in sales productivity and an over 12% reduction in marketing overhead.

It’s entirely possible to do this without machine learning, but AI makes your automation efforts much more personalized and much more powerful.

Utilize Chatbots

Chatbots are a powerful customer service tool. Eight out of ten consumers who have engaged with them report a positive experience. If you run an online business, they are all but essential.

With chatbots, you don’t have to have a human on-hand to respond to consumers. Instead, machine learning-powered chatbots can automatically answer consumer queries with a scarily-high rate of accuracy. That’s because your chatbot will learn from your website’s content and the conversations it has with consumers to constantly improve the answers it provides.

Because the chatbot is continuously learning and improving itself, it will deliver an even better customer experience with more conversations. You may want to have your chatbot pass an incredibly complicated query onto a human at first, but soon the bot will become so effective there’ll be no need for a human to interject.  Eventually, you’ll have a smart enough chatbot to upsell the consumer, not just answer their questions.

Consumers probably won’t be able to tell they’re speaking to a robot, either. Some chatbots, like IntelliTicks, employ another branch of AI, Natural Language Processing (NLP), to have human-level conversations with customers.

What’s more, data gathered by AI-powered chatbots can be analyzed by another machine learning algorithm to generate insights that marketers can use to optimize their efforts going forward.

What is the Future of Machine Learning?

Things move fast in the world of machine learning. Expect advances in marketing AI to happen rapidly.

Improved unsupervised machine learning algorithms are in development right now, for instance. These algorithms don’t need input from humans at the start, making them much easier and faster for marketers to implement.

Personalization will become even more powerful, too. Machine learning algorithms will become better at discerning what consumers want for one, but the ways they can be integrated with online stores will improve, too. Soon, marketers will be able to customize every part of their sites for individual users, much like social media timelines are personalized for every user.

Finally, expect big advances in mobile machine learning. AI-powered digital assistants will become a more prominent part of our life, and marketers will have to develop strategies to contend with this. Mobile applications will also be able to integrate machine learning features in the same way websites can right now.

Don’t get overwhelmed, however. Before you start worrying about what the future holds, work your way through the suggestions I’ve made above first. You’ll then be ready for whatever occurs in the future.

Conclusion

It’s clear: machine learning can transform your digital marketing efforts.

Don’t rush into the world of machine learning, however. Adopting solutions without first understanding how the technology works and its role in your company will typically do more harm than good.

Machine learning is powerful, but it isn’t a silver bullet. Adopt one solution at a time, however, and you’ll be fine.  

Continue your education by reading my articles on AI’s role in SEO and AI-powered digital assistants.  

Which machine learning strategy are you going to implement first?

The post How to Use Machine Learning to Improve Your Digital Marketing appeared first on Neil Patel.